Utilize Lessonly for HIPAA Training

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HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was put in place in 1996 to protect employees in between jobs. Like most regulatory standards in the healthcare industry, HIPAA requires training for your company to be considered compliant. Understanding this important set of laws allows your company to avoid unfortunate legal situations, saving you time and money. HIPAA training can take many different forms. Some organizations use older methods like creating a HIPAA training powerpoint, while others will create a HIPAA training video for employees. Either way, you need to make sure your HIPAA training course will cover all of the HIPAA training requirements that you need for HIPAA training certification. By the way, the correct spelling is HIPAA, not HIPPA. Training on HIPAA laws is critical, no matter how you deliver it, or spell it.

At Lessonly, we view HIPAA training like we do every type of training: important. By training your staff on HIPAA rules, you’re not just meeting a requirement, you’re also expanding your team’s knowledge. You’re enabling them to perform their job in the right way, while also furthering the rights of your customers and patients. A typical outline HIPAA training will include topics like the core privacy and security rules within HIPAA, what protected health information covers, practical ways to keep PHI secure and private, and what employees need to do if they don’t comply with the rules. As with all training, be sure to add a quiz or two to make sure your team is understanding what they need to at the level they need to.

Simply showing a HIPAA training video isn’t going to help employees retain information. With that said, attaching a HIPAA training powerpoint through an email is almost equivalent; either no one will pay attention to it, or the information remembered from it won’t line-up with HIPAA training requirements. How often should you use rich media? It’s not that using a video or powerpoint for HIPAA learning is wrong, but solely showing a HIPAA training video for employees is not the best method. Using a combination of media in a HIPAA training course is the way to go.

HIPAA Laws for Employers

As a covered entity under HIPAA (health care providers, clearinghouses, or plans), can only disclose health information if permitted, generally for treatment purposes. In 2009, HIPAA rules expanded to businesses that use health information to perform services on behalf of covered entities, like data analysis companies. After that, limitations to disclosure become much more complex.
Because covered entities need to ensure the knowledge and following of HIPAA laws, ongoing training for HIPAA compliance is beneficial for employers and existing employees. HIPAA requirements for employers depend on which rule is being applied, the HIPAA Privacy Rule or the HIPAA Security Rule. But all topics for training on HIPAA requirements will include subjects like HIPAA laws for minors and HIPAA laws for employees.

HIPAA Privacy Rule

The HIPAA privacy rule is established for covered entities and their associates to protect personal health information and medical records. The privacy laws give patients rights over their health information and provide standards for HIPAA privacy rule employers to disclose or restrict disclosure of health information.

A HIPAA privacy rule summary can be found here, but for employers, we give these important take-aways:

You must provide training on what information can and cannot be disclosed

Have a process to ensure the security of health information

Information can be used in cases of treatment, payment, and to protect the general public’s health in case of spreading

HIPAA Security Rule

The HIPAA security rule is geared toward medical employers who must have training, processes, and procedures in place to adhere to the HIPAA security requirements. These things focus on the electronic handling of information from an organization.

The HIPAA security rules are split up into five different subjects, all which require extensive informational training to those assigned as directors within an organization:

Administrative safeguard
Administrative safeguarding is the training and implementation of practices and procedures to properly handle health documentation. This includes assigning roles of those responsible for managing and monitoring HIPAA standards as well as recognizing violations and having an emergency plan in place in case a security incident arises.

Physical safeguards
HIPAA security physical safeguard standards precisely have to do with the kind of hardware and electronic equipment housing secure information. Physical safeguards designate who can use and access information in a workstation.

Technical safeguards
These standards define the less tangible aspects of the security rule. They cover things like audit and access controls, integrity, identity authentication, and the proper transmission of information.

Organizational requirements
This requirement revolves around the necessary documentation of BAs and group health plans.

Policies procedures, and documentation requirementsThis is an overarching rule which describes the policies and procedures within an organization to comply with the security rule. Additionally, proper digital or documentation of these process must be available for reference.These documents must be maintained upon six years from creation or last-effect.

HIPAA violations

Violating HIPAA standards can result in costly fees for an organization. Not to mention possibilities of lawsuits. Generally, there are no civil penalties if the violation is corrected within 30 days. Fees are determined by the HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) but usually have a gauged amount. Here are some violations with penalties:

An employee did not know she was in violation of HIPAA – without proper training, this can become frequent. The penalty for an individual can range anywhere between $100 and $50,000. Repeat violations under this circumstance can range between $50,000 and $1.5 million.

Violations due to reasonable cause – this violation can cause upwards to $10,000 for the violation and $100,000 to $1.5 million for repeat offenses.

Violation with willful neglect, but corrected within the assigned time period – $10,000 per violation. The annual maximum can reach to $1.5 million.

Violation due to willful neglect and left ignored – $50,00 per violation with an annual cap at $1.5 million

Though these often apply to individuals within an organization, companies themselves can be held accountable for violations of HIPAA principles of corporate criminal liability or regarding an individual guilty of conspiracy.

HIPAA Certification

Becoming HIPAA certified acts as a sense of safety for an organization. Whether it’s training a few, key employees in regards to directing HIPAA compliance or briefing your entire team, knowing the ins and outs of HIPAA is going to save an organization a lot of money, but more importantly, it will equip teams with the right processes and procedures to assure staff and clients that there is no potential breach of medical information.

HIPAA certification programs are available online and in-person. There are programs designed to teach and award HIPAA accreditation to directors within and organization and/or general staff on HIPAA security and privacy rules. This is not to be confused with HIPAA certification requirements for business or HIPAA certificate of creditable coverage. HIPAA certifications for businesses is the submission of documentation of a business’s HIPAA compliance program. HIPAA certificate of creditable coverage use to be required for individuals switching health plans, but is no longer necessary as of December 14, 2015.

The HIPAA form

HIPAA forms are usually provided to individuals upon requests from their doctors. They are also downloadable on some websites. These forms act as release form for an individual’s information. Upon signing, an individual gives permission to share certain health information that would otherwise be undisclosable to health-related companies.

Army HIPAA training

HIPAA training is required within 30 days of onboarding to the army and once a year thereafter. Army HIPAA certification lessons are generally accessed through Joint Knowledge Online (JKO). This training is unique to military health systems while still complying with HIPAA privacy and security rules.

HIPAA refresher training army can help those taking HIPAA certification army study for certification by reading a yearly published manual, attending in-person sessions, or participating in webinars.

HIPAA Training and Lessonly

Lessonly is an elearning software that can help your team get informed with HIPAA laws. If you send your lead team in for HIPAA certification, it would be beneficial to teach and explain HIPAA standards to your entire staff.

With that said, Lessonly is a great choice for implementing compliance training for HIPAA. We take the traditional online learning system and condense it from clunky to seamless. Lessonly gets teams up to speed and keeps them there.

Lessonly software makes learning easy to build, track, and learn. From the administrative end, we provide administrators with the tools to assign, build, and track learning throughout an entire organization. Once learners are added, Lessonly lessons can be assigned with the check of a box. If there’s a group in your company that’s always learning something new, you can designate those learners to a group and send them that way. Have a one-off lesson you need to send to someone that missed it? Lessonly also provides links you can simply copy, paste, and send through email.

No longer do you have to print out training manuals and schedule classroom sessions bound to feel ripped from a scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. You don’t have to worry if students are listening or actually reading the material (and cheating on the review quiz), because Lessonly gives admins tracking capabilities. With the tracking feature, you can see the progress of each learner, review their quiz questions and answers, and receive a detailed report of progress as frequently as each day.

Tracking is especially valuable to those going through HIPAA training. Because adhering to HIPAA standards is so important to the security and reputation of an organization, keeping all learners informed, aware, and on the same page, is simply taking the necessary steps to avoid HIPAA violation. With that said, because Lessonly has tracking, admins can see who is excelling in learning and who is falling behind. Those who fall behind can retake lessons until they pass.

Tracking also helps learning become a two-way street. Lessonly has polling and free-response questions admins can add to lessons to get feedback from learners. This opens up a discourse between teachers and learners to help improve and innovate within a company.

When it comes to building content, Lessonly lets you take the reigns. This has helped so many companies take complicated content and simplify it for mass learning. In regards to HIPAA, the administrator can create lessons explaining the complicated law and compliance processes and procedures with colloquial language. You can incorporate rich media too. Videos, photos, and even GIFs are a great way to shake up employee training. Lessonly’s interface makes content creation intuitive — simpler than powerpoint or other content creation software.

From the learner’s perspective, Lessonly can be an entertaining way to learn content. With great formatted content from the admin side, learners won’t feel like they’re learning. We’re big believers that entertaining while informing leads to higher retention. We talk a little bit about the importance of a learner’s laugh on our blog.

Lessonly helps learners learn in their best environment too. Lessons are accessible on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. This way, admins can give a hard deadline for finishing a lesson, and until then, the learners can take the lesson at their convenience.

If you’re interested in Lessonly, try out a free tour. The tour lets you become immersed as a creator on the platform. You can experience lesson-making first hand, assign courses, and track the progress of those you’ve sent to. Lessonly continues to get teams up-to-speed and keep them there.